Briefs (left)

Brooklyn Man Gets 25 YearsIn Beating of Gay Man

By Andy NewmanTHE NEW YORK TIMES NEW YORK

A Brooklyn man was sentenced Monday to 25 years in prison for beating and stomping a gay man so viciously that he suffered serious brain damage and is partly paralyzed. The defendant, Steven Pomie, 25, had told investigators that the victim, Dwan Prince, made a pass at him on the street.

Justice Deborah A. Dowling of State Supreme Court in Brooklyn seemed aghast at the intensity of the attack as she sentenced Pomie for assault committed as a hate crime. “Words alone should never be enough to provoke such a rage,” she told him. “That’s never an excuse for anything.”

Prince, now 28, was a construction worker and a porter in his apartment building in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and was taking out the garbage last June 8 when Pomie walked by. Pomie told investigators that he was wearing his girlfriend’s pink tank top and that Prince made some flirtatious remarks to him.

A prosecution witness testified that he saw Pomie and another man beating and kicking someone and then leaving, and that as Prince lay against a wall dazed and bleeding a few minutes later, Pomie returned and kicked him squarely in the head.

Greenpeace, EPA Ex-ChiefsTo Lobby for Nuke Plants

By Matthew L. WaldTHE NEW YORK TIMES WASHINGTON

The nuclear industry has hired Christie Whitman, the former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, and Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, the environmental organization, to lead a public relations campaign for new reactors.

Nuclear power is “environmentally friendly, affordable, clean, dependable and safe,” Whitman said at a news conference Monday. She said that as head of the EPA for two and a half years, ending in June 2003, and as governor of New Jersey for seven years, she had promoted various means to reduce emissions of gases that cause global warming and pollution. But she said that “none of them will have as great a positive impact on our environment as will increasing our ability to generate electricity from nuclear power.”

Whitman headed the EPA when it published rules for the proposed high-level nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. After she left office, the courts threw out the rules because they covered only the first 10,000 years of waste storage, while peak releases of radiation were expected after that time.

Bush Offers Limited SupportFor Senate Immigration Bill

By Elisabeth BumillerTHE NEW YORK TIMES IRVINE, CALIF.

President Bush reinserted himself into the divisive debate over immigration on Monday, speaking favorably of a stalled Senate compromise that would put the vast majority of the nation’s 11 million illegal immigrants on a path to citizenship.

In remarks to some 300 Orange County business leaders, Bush said the bipartisan Senate compromise, which fell apart this month as Republicans and Democrats maneuvered for political advantage, was “an interesting approach.”

His words fell short of an outright endorsement of the plan, but they signaled that he preferred the Senate approach over a House immigration bill that focuses on border security and would turn illegal immigrants into felons. The president’s position put him to the left of many conservative Republicans who say the Senate plan’s citizenship provisions amount to amnesty.